Bruce Nelson presents a fascinating account of race in the discourse of Irish nationalists from the early nineteenth century to the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921. Focusing on prominent individuals such as Daniel O'Connell and Michael Davitt, as well as the less well known such as Erskine Childers and Liam Mellows, he wants to counter the position that “portrayed Irish nationalism as a force that was turned inward, preoccupied overwhelmingly with ‘Ourselves,’ expressing little, if any, interest in parallel movements for emancipation in other parts of the world” (11). He believes his cause is helped by the fact that Irish emigration played a major role in creating an “outward-looking people” (11), a process that was reinforced by Irish nationalists looking for support for their efforts among the diaspora population.

In their attempts to create an Irish nation, Irish nationalists sought “racial vindication” (11) as whites because the English had racialized them as something lower than the Anglo-Saxon. This feeling of inferiority did not infect Daniel O'Connell, however. More a product of the Enlightenment than the Romantic era of nations, O'Connell ignored the charges of British opponents that he was some kind of savage. He also dismissed the calls of the protonationalists of Young Ireland that he should focus on Irish issues rather than universal ones. Despite some damage to his Irish causes, O'Connell advocated the immediate end of slavery in the Americas. O'Connell's public stance earned him not only the approbation of most Irish Americans but also the admiration of black abolitionists like Frederick Douglass. Michael Davitt, too, could shift his focus from the Irish land and Home Rule struggles of the late nineteenth century to support the cause of anticolonial elements around the globe. Nelson finds Davitt's support for the Zulus in southern Africa and for the Aboriginal peoples on a visit to Australia particularly noteworthy. Nevertheless, O'Connell's efforts failed to move Irish Americans toward support of emancipation, and Davitt would eventually see native Africans who hindered white Afrikaners' struggle against Britain in the Anglo-Boer wars as “hordes of Kaffirs” (138). The British diplomat turned Irish nationalist Erskine Childers, despite concern for other anticolonial struggles, ultimately propagated the Irish as “white men” to forward the cause.

However, despite these claims to white privilege, Nelson highlights prominent black nationalists in the United States like Marcus Garvey and Claude Kay, who were inspired by the Irish national effort, especially the self-determination philosophy of Arthur Griffith's Sinn Féin. Ironically, they seemed unaware of his racist views. It was in the maelstrom of Progressive Era America that Nelson finds the greatest opportunities for Irish nationalists to truly internationalize their own effort. Through the Irish Progressive League, especially key members like Peter Golden, Kate Walsh, and Hannah Sheehy-Skeffington, the idea that the “Irish are for freedom everywhere” (211) grew and proved useful to the Irish Republican movement by establishing, for example, a cross-racial boycott of British shipping on New York City's docks. This multiracial action on behalf of Irish freedom impressed the visiting Éamon De Valera's lieutenants Harry Boland and Liam Mellows. Mellows, who believed in the “Irish race” and a unique Irish “spirit,” converted to a much broader internationalism in America. Only his premature death at the hands of a firing squad in the Irish Civil War cut short his journey toward opposition to, as he put it, “any form of injustice in any country the world over” (257). Ultimately, Nelson concludes, Mellows was “giving an expression to a discourse that could claim an honourable place in the long tradition of making race and nation in Ireland and the ‘Greater Ireland’ across the sea” (257).

Nelson is right to point out these universalist views among Irish nationalists ranging from O'Connell to Mellows. However, the fact remains that, apart from O'Connell, who had no time for a unique Irish culture beyond Roman Catholicism or any essentialist notions of Irishness, Mellows, Childers, and the like, still believed in the idea of a distinctive Irish race. Nelson shows clearly not only that these racial views often led to Progressive critiques of industrial capitalism and imperialism but also that the Irish in Ireland and America were sure of their place in the racial hierarchy. One could have sympathy for other anticolonial struggles and still be a racist. Young Irelander John Mitchel, for example, was scathing in his criticism of British imperialism in India, but he was also a supporter of the enslavement of Africans. According to him, the people of India were an ancient “race” and had a long a distinguished culture, unlike Africans. Through this racial reasoning, Mitchel saw no incongruence between his support for Irish freedom and Africans' slavery. Mitchel's essentialist and supremacist views of the Irish, reinforced in Ireland by Arthur Griffith's Sinn Féin (“We, Ourselves,” “Ourselves alone”) and in the diaspora through events such as the numerous “Irish Race” conventions, meant that the chauvinistic form of Irish nationalism dominated discourse and opinion. Thousands attended these race conventions, but there were only about 150 members of the Irish Progressive League. Mitchel and Griffith were far more influential than Childers and Mellows. It's no wonder, then, that Irish nationalists automatically claimed “whiteness” in their struggle. While Nelson might be overly sanguine about the depth of support for a truly internationalist position, he nonetheless provides an excellent description of the use and misuse of race in nationalist rhetoric. For anyone interested in the development of an Irish national identity in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and its connection to the popular racial ideologies of the same period, this book is an essential starting point.